John and I have had a busy weekend racing ahead of Tuesday's forecasted rain! It's 10pm now and as soon as I finish up this blog post I get to have dinner. :) But we accomplished a lot: two rows of the strawberries are entirely weeded; the first batch of head lettuces are in the ground, as are beets, chard, and cabbages; the salad mix bed is prepped for planting later this week; codling moth traps are set in the orchard; the petal fall nutritional sprays are on the peaches; the garden across the driveway is cleared and one bed is composted and ready to plant; and I got a new compost pile started.
Also, I became acquainted with a new insect this weekend: the green pug moth, whose larva is chewing the middles out of my apple blossoms: http://bugguide.net/node/view/355667. Little bugger.
Of course there are lot more things I WISH we could get done before another rain moves in! I'm especially concerned about finishing weeding the strawberries before they get too far along in their bloom, since the weeds are competing with them for nutrients during this critical time. I also don't like disturbing their roots too much while they are trying to set fruit so I want that job done so that I can leave them alone to make their lovely little fruits.
And . . . the kale, pac choi, and spinach all need to be planted. And the carrots. And the turnips. And the arugula. And the onions. And I need to put up the fence around the garden across the drive. And it's time to start seeding curcurbits indoors. It must be May!
As usual, what we do this week will be very dependent on the weather. It looks like we've got a good chance of rain on Tuesday afternoon, so we may end up working on what the Wednesday group did last week--taking apart supers and frames from our beehive that died out over the winter so that we can clean them up and make them ready for re-use. That will give us an opportunity to talk a little more about bees, their importance to agriculture, and the difficulties beekeepers have been having in recent years in keeping them alive.
Here are a couple of videos that will give you a little background on Colony Collapse Disorder, which has been plaguing our honeybee populations for quite awhile now, including one on beekeeping in cities:
Marla Spivak on Colony Collapse Disorder: http://www.ted.com/talks/marla_spivak_why_bees_are_disappearing
Noah Wilson-Rich on Urban Beekeeping: http://www.ted.com/talks/noah_wilson_rich_every_city_needs_healthy_honey_bees
And from PBS's Nature, a clip on the "dance-language" of bees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lE-8QuBDkkw
Aren't bees amazing? Honestly, when people ask me why I keep bees (or try to!) I struggle to answer. It's an expensive hobby and although we like honey a lot, that's not really the reason. Nor is pollination--our wild bees are very capable of doing that job (of course, we need to quit poisoning them too). But I think the truth is that keeping bees lets me peer into a different world, the world of insects, in an intimate way, a way that lets me try to imagine the world through their experience. It shakes up my human perspective and makes me realize how much I don't know about what's happening right under my nose in this world. The bees humble me as they amaze me.
Wednesday folks, we're going to have to see what the weather does to us. If we don't get a big soaking rain on Tuesday and the ground is drying enough by Wednesday afternoon, we'll dig into planting. If everything is soaked, we'll punt.
See ya'll soon!
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